Related papers: Evolutionary Stochastic Policy Distillation
We study the theoretical capacity to statistically learn local landscape information by Evolution Strategies (ESs). Specifically, we investigate the covariance matrix when constructed by ESs operating with the selection operator alone. We…
On-Policy Distillation (OPD) has gained wide attraction as an LLM post-training paradigm due to its effectiveness in improving capabilities without introducing model distribution drift, and consequently, regression in general tasks.…
Genomic selection (GS) is a technique that plant breeders use to select individuals to mate and produce new generations of species. Allocation of resources is a key factor in GS. At each selection cycle, breeders are facing the choice of…
Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for deploying RL agents in real-world applications, as it aims to maximize long-term rewards while satisfying safety constraints. However, safe RL often suffers from sample inefficiency, requiring…
We develop the theory of Energy Conserving Descent (ECD) and introduce ECDSep, a gradient-based optimization algorithm able to tackle convex and non-convex optimization problems. The method is based on the novel ECD framework of…
Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…
The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…
Offline reinforcement learning methods typically enforce strict constraints to ensure safety; yet this rigidity often prevents the discovery of optimal behaviors outside the immediate support of the behavior policy. To address this, we…
We propose a population-based Evolutionary Stochastic Gradient Descent (ESGD) framework for optimizing deep neural networks. ESGD combines SGD and gradient-free evolutionary algorithms as complementary algorithms in one framework in which…
Recent reinforcement learning has enhanced the flow matching models on human preference alignment. While stochastic sampling enables the exploration of denoising directions, existing methods which optimize over multiple denoising steps…
Exploration efficiency poses a significant challenge in goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) tasks, particularly those with long horizons and sparse rewards. A primary limitation to exploration efficiency is the agent's inability…
Hybrid training methods for large language models combine supervised fine tuning (SFT) on expert demonstrations with reinforcement learning (RL) on model rollouts, typically at the sample level. We propose Entropy Gated Selective Policy…
Many problems in Reinforcement Learning (RL) seek an optimal policy with large discrete multidimensional yet unordered action spaces; these include problems in randomized allocation of resources such as placements of multiple security…
We present a method for Temporal Difference (TD) learning that addresses several challenges faced by robots learning to navigate in a marine environment. For improved data efficiency, our method reduces TD updates to Gaussian Process…
Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…
The aim of this paper is to study the reward based policy exploration problem in a supervised learning approach and enable robots to form complex movement trajectories in challenging reward settings and search spaces. For this, the…
This paper investigates group distributionally robust optimization (GDRO) with the goal of learning a model that performs well over $m$ different distributions. First, we formulate GDRO as a stochastic convex-concave saddle-point problem,…
One of the key challenges that Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces is its limited capability to adapt to a change of data distribution caused by uncertainties. This challenge arises especially in RL systems using deep neural networks as…
Standard knowledge distillation for autoregressive models often suffers from distribution mismatch. While on-policy methods mitigate this by leveraging student-generated outputs, they rely on computationally expensive Reinforcement Learning…
Evolution strategies (ES), as a family of black-box optimization algorithms, recently emerge as a scalable alternative to reinforcement learning (RL) approaches such as Q-learning or policy gradient, and are much faster when many central…